Ken Dixon, Staff Writer

Published 8:42 pm, Saturday, November 27, 2010

This week's independent recount of Bridgeport's Nov. 2 voting results will show how well -- or how poorly -- residents of the state's largest city understood the four-year-old paper ballot and optical-scanner technology.

If teams of voter advocates find a significant number of ballots with candidate names circled instead of the "bubbles" adjacent to their names filled in, then city voters need more education.

If voters circled names on the photocopied ballots created by local voting officials when their inadequate stock of 21,100 ran out on the afternoon of Election Day, they might have benefited by the subsequent hand count, where officials determined voter intent.

Conversely, errors in voting that would have been caught and ballots rejected in the optical-scan machines -- giving voters a second chance to fill out a ballot correctly -- could have resulted in wasted photo-copied ballots.

An example would be a case where a voter accidentally filled in bubbles for two competing candidates, such as Democrat Dannel Malloy and Republican Tom Foley.

The optical-scan machine would not accept the ballot, but would give the voter another opportunity to fill out a new ballot. However the photocopy -- too thin to be read by the scanner -- was probably not caught by election officials, and the voter would have walked away leaving a "spoiled" ballot to be counted -- and thrown out -- later on.

The results will become clearer this week, when voter advocacy groups will recount each of the more than 23,000 ballots cast in the city's 25 polling precincts, as well as absentee and provisional ballots allowed people who did not have proper Election Day identification.

It's part of the Connecticut Post's effort to get to the bottom of the city's election meltdown, in which the small stock of printed ballots ran out, local officials photocopied thousands more and Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz successfully persuaded a state judge to keep open a dozen polling precincts for two hours longer than usual.

The resulting multi-day delay in counting the ballots left the outcome of the gubernatorial election -- ultimately won by Malloy by 6,404 votes -- in doubt for nearly a week before Foley finally conceded in the closest race since 1954.

During an interview last week Bysiewicz, the state's top elections official, and Lesley Mara, her deputy, stressed the need for the upcoming Bridgeport recanvas to have enough eyes on the ballots as they are retabulated.

The state's required audit of optical-scan votes that was recently completed in 74 random precincts among the state's 734 precincts, but none in Bridgeport, included Democrats and Republicans reviewing each ballot.

Bysiewicz described the optical-scan machines as very efficient, to the point where an "X" in a bubble, or even a tiny pencil mark, would get read.

"That's why we tell people that if there are stray marks on their ballots, if you have a little pin dot and that's not who you want to vote for, then go get another ballot because the machine is very sensitive," Bysiewicz said in an interview following the announcement of the statewide certified results last week.

On the downside, the scanners would not pick up circled names or circled bubbles.

"Let's say you colored one bubble in and got tired and started circling the circles, then as long as one vote is cast, then it'll count it," said Bysiewicz, adding that the other intended votes would not be read by the scanner.

In the case of a photocopied ballot, however, city election officials probably caught all those votes in their hand counts.

Bysiewicz said voter intent is probably better reviewed in a hand count because of the potential to spot the circled names that would not be read by the machines.

"It may never come to light unless there was an audit or a recount," she said.

"If you still see a high incidence of people not getting it in terms of filling in the bubble, then I would say we have to look at what we can do to educate people," Mara said.

Bysiewicz said that as photocopied ballots were offered voters, she received a "panicked" call from state Rep. Auden Grogins, a Bridgeport Democrat, who complained that an unspecified number of photocopies in her district did not include either her name or her opponent's.

That was around mid-afternoon, after Mara had the first of several phone conversations with Santa Ayala, the Democratic Bridgeport registrar of voters.

"She had already begun the process of photocopying," Mara recalled of their first conversation around 2:15.

"We said to her just recognize you have to follow the same chain of custody that you would usually," Mara said. "If you're bringing 200 ballots to this school, you need to have a log there that says `at this time I released 200 ballots to this school for this ward or district.' She said she understood."

During a news conference last week announcing certified statewide election results, Bysiewicz told reporters that there are no penalties for local election officials who miss filing their official results by 6 p.m. the day after voting.

But in fact, state election law requires $50 fines for local head moderators who miss the deadline.

"At 6 o'clock we'll have a lot of the towns in but then our elections officers will be on the phone, usually to the biggest cities, saying `New Haven, can we pretty please, pretty pretty please have our report?' Bridgeport, Hartford, they're usually the ones," Bysiewicz said in the interview, acknowledging the required penalties. "So I have not called my deputy in to levy the fines and drive around and collect those $50 bills."